It may not be making the news headlines in today's tough economic environment, but companies still have a need to hire staff. Many businesses have, or are currently, restructuring their operations. And in the process of transforming into a leaner, more nimble organization, these same businesses are discovering there is still a need to fill high talent jobs quickly and inexpensively.

The recruiting process in larger organizations is normally quite complex and costs can easily escalate if effective hiring processes and procedures are not implemented or automated across the organization. Additional cost-related problems that can often arise from inefficient hiring processes include:

• Accounting and HR systems which are not intuitive for new users resulting in additional training costs.
• Too much time consumed by highly skilled and expensive professionals in working through the hiring process.
• Hiring process status that is hard to determine.
• Hiring processes that may be inconsistent and not easily auditable.

The hiring process itself involves several people, approvals, and several steps in finding applicants and getting them through the screening and interviewing process. In short, it can take a long time to hire someone and be frustrating to all concerned.

Without an automated hiring system that is easy to use, hiring managers spend a lot of time trying to learn how to request and interact with jobs and recruiting processes. They may be searching for documents and an understanding of the approval process is often needed. These managers are the highly paid and highly skilled individuals that are needed to run the business. Any time they spend on administration is both frustrating for them and costly for the company.

And let's not forget regulatory and legal issues. Increasingly, there is a need for hiring processes to be completely auditable. If there are manual steps to the process, they are hard to track and even harder to report on later. In fact, in many organizations there are staff devoted to writing up parts of the recruiting process and outcomes in order to comply with regulatory and audit requirements.

Today, we introduced a new solution designed to bring simplicity, efficiency, and automation to the entire corporate recruiting process. The solution helps organizations to better manage the many complexities of the hiring process by using a collaborative, flexible case management approach. Training time and expenses are reduced by the solution's utilization of the familiar and user-friendly Microsoft SharePoint, Microsoft Office and Outlook environments to facilitate the tasks related to the recruitment process.

Furthermore, the solution is tightly integrated with the human resource management system, PeopleSoft, to provide direct access to ERP data from within the Microsoft Office application. Recruiting Management for SharePoint differentiates itself from other offerings in that it does not require the end-user in HR, or more importantly the recruiting manager in the line department, to learn a new user interface and the intricacies of the ERP system. Instead, the ERP data is presented in a very natural way from the employee's well known desktop apps. So what was once an endless web of entangled and complex hiring processes can easily be transformed into a streamlined, intuitive, and efficient hiring system, minimizing the time required for hiring managers, recruiters, and reviewers involved in the recruiting process. Quality staff can be brought on board quickly and an organization's hiring processes become much more auditable with the solution's compliance needs built in.

So despite the economic uncertainties that lie ahead, organizations can be certain of one thing: hiring quality staff is essential for every organization regardless of the economic climate so ensure it is done in a cost-effective, and efficient manner, just like any other business process.